Univision Special Exposes More Gun Walking Programs

Yesterday I mentioned the Univision special on Operation Fast and Furious, an Obama era gun walking program that began on Halloween, 2009. The Bush era program, Wide Receiver, had been shut down when the ATF realized that the Mexican cartels were able to circumvent the trackers in the guns, and only lost about 400 guns. F&F encompassed almost 2,000 weapons and was included a raft of alphabet soup agencies, not just the ATF. Little attempt was made to track these guns. Two federal agents and at least 200 Mexican citizens have been killed by these weapons, with scores injured. The goverment of Mexico was not informed about the guns being walked during F&F, unlike during Wide Receiver.

(ABC News) On January 30, 2010, a commando of at least 20 hit men parked themselves outside a birthday party of high school and college students in Villas de Salvarcar, Ciudad Juarez. Near midnight, the assassins, later identified as hired guns for the Mexican cartel La Linea, broke into a one-story house and opened fire on a gathering of nearly 60 teenagers. Outside, lookouts gunned down a screaming neighbor and several students who had managed to escape. Fourteen young men and women were killed, and 12 more were wounded before the hit men finally fled.

Indirectly, the United States government played a role in the massacre by supplying some of the firearms used by the cartel murderers. Three of the high caliber weapons fired that night in Villas de Salvarcar were linked to a gun tracing operation run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), according to a Mexican army document obtained exclusively by Univision News.

Interestingly, most American media outlets have ignored F&F, and still are. A perusal of CBS News, NBC News, MSNBC, CNN, the NY Times, Washington Post, and a few others shows, amazingly, zero coverage of this Univision report.

The Univision News investigation also found ATF offices from states besides Arizona pursued similar misguided strategies. In Florida, the weapons from Operation Castaway ended up in the hands of criminals in Colombia, Honduras and Venezuela (link audio crumpler), the lead informant in the case told Univision News in a prison interview.

“When the ATF stopped me, they told me the guns were going to cartels,” Hugh Crumpler, a Vietnam veteran turned arms trafficker, told Univision News. “The ATF knew before I knew and had been following me for a considerable length of time. They could not have followed me for two months like they said they did, and not know the guns were going somewhere, and not want for that to be happening.”

There you go, more gun walking programs which led to deaths. How is this not news? Why are these programs not being investigated by every media outlet? During the Bush years, if a Koran was flushed at Guantanamo Bay detention facility, it was a massive huge monster story (which was also false), and Bush was blamed. When a few idiots decided to express their idiocy at Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq, the media couldn’t mention it enough. And blamed Bush. Anything that happened that looked bad was magnified and put on Bush’s desk. Yet, there were no deaths involved. I’m not saying that Obama had anything to do with, or any knowledge of, these gun walking programs. The head of any organization, whether private sector or government, can’t know everything that happens. But the media have shown little interest in what they traditionally love, a good bloody story involving government incompetence.

The Department of Justice has denied the existence of such programs, despite the physical evidence of guns recovered suggesting otherwise. While the Univision report focused on guns the DOJ ran to Mexican cartels, there is enough evidence to suggest other Obama administration-sanctioned gun-walking plots arming domestic criminal gangs, such as the so-called Gangwalker plot in Indiana, which supplied Chicago street gangs, and similar rumored operations in California, North Carolina, northern Florida, and elsewhere, which provided weapons to gangs in U.S. cities. Nor has the Univision report focused on weapons that have found their way to cartels via the State Department or the Department of Defense.